III.  Thirdly, youth is exposed to sudden temptations, and surprisals into sin.  The general traits that have been mentioned as belonging to the early period in human life render it peculiarly liable to solicitations.  The whole being of a healthful hilarious youth, who feels life in every limb, thrills to temptation, like the lyre to the plectrum.  Body and soul are alive to all the enticements of the world of sense; and in certain critical moments, the entire sensorium, upon the approach of bold and powerful excitements, flutters and trembles like an electrometer in a thunder-storm.  All passionate poetry breathes of youth and spring.  Most of the catastrophes of the novel and the drama turn upon the violent action of some temptation, upon the highly excitable nature of youth.  All literature testifies to the hazards that attend the morning of our existence; and daily experience and observation, certainly, corroborate the testimony.  It becomes necessary, therefore, to guard the human soul against these liabilities which attend it in its forming period.  And, next to a deep and all-absorbing love of God, there is nothing so well adapted to protect against sudden surprisals, as a profound and definite fear of God.

It is a great mistake, to suppose that apostate and corrupt beings like ourselves can pass through all the temptations of this life unscathed, while looking solely at the pleasant aspects of the Divine Being, and the winning forms of religious truth.  We are not yet seraphs; and we cannot always trust to our affectionateness, to carry us through a violent attack of temptation.  There are moments in the experience of the Christian himself, when he is compelled to call in the fear of God to his aid, and to steady his infirm and wavering virtue by the recollection that “the wages of sin is death.”  “By the fear of the Lord, men,”—­and Christian men too,—­“depart from evil.”  It will not always be so.  When that which is perfect is come, perfect love shall cast out fear; but, until the disciple of Christ reaches heaven, his religious experience must be a somewhat complex one.  A reasonable and well-defined apprehensiveness must mix with his affectionateness, and deter him from transgression, in those severe passages in his history when love is languid and fails to draw him.  Says an old English divine:  “The fear of God’s judgments, or of the threatenings of God, is of much efficiency, when some present temptation presseth upon us.  When conscience and the affections are divided; when conscience doth withdraw a man from sin, and when his carnal affections draw him forth to it; then should the fear of God come in.  It is a holy design for a Christian, to counterbalance the pleasures of sin with the terrors of it, and thus to cure the poison of the viper by the flesh of the viper.  Thus that admirable saint and martyr, Bishop Hooper, when he came to die, one endeavored to dehort him from death by this:  O sir, consider that life is sweet and death is bitter; presently he replied, Life to come is more sweet, and death to come is more bitter, and so went to the stake and patiently endured the fire.  Thus, as a Christian may sometimes outweigh the pleasures of sin by the consideration of the reward of God, so, sometimes, he may quench the pleasures of sin by the consideration of the terrors of God."[4]